a list, in
all the Circumlocution Office, of places that might fall vacant anywhere within
half a century, from a lord of the Treasury to a Chinese consul, and up again to
a governor-general of India, but, as applicants for such places, the names of
some or of every one of these hungry and adhesive Barnacles were down.
    It was necessarily but a sprinkling of any class of Barnacles that attended
the marriage, for there were not two score in all, and what is that subtracted
from Legion! But, the sprinkling was a swarm in the Twickenham cottage, and
filled it. A Barnacle (assisted by a Barnacle) married the happy pair, and it
behoved Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle himself to conduct Mrs. Meagles to breakfast.
    The entertainment was not as agreeable and natural as it might have been.
Mr. Meagles, hove down by his good company while he highly appreciated it, was
not himself. Mrs. Gowan was herself, and that did not improve him. The fiction
that it was not Mr. Meagles who had stood in the way, but that it was the Family
greatness, and that the Family greatness had made a concession, and there was
now a soothing unanimity, pervaded the affair, though it was never openly
expressed. Then the Barnacles felt that they for their parts would have done
with the Meagleses, when the present patronising occasion was over; and the
Meagleses felt the same for their parts. Then Gowan asserting his rights as a
disappointed man who had his grudge against the family, and who perhaps had
allowed his mother to have them there, as much in the hope that it might give
them some annoyance as with any other benevolent object, aired his pencil and
his poverty ostentatiously before them, and told them he hoped in time to settle
a crust of bread and cheese on his wife, and that he begged such of them as
(more fortunate than himself) came in for any good thing, and could buy a
picture, to please to remember the poor painter. Then Lord Decimus, who was a
wonder on his own Parliamentary pedestal, turned out to be the windiest creature
here: proposing happiness to the bride and bridegroom in a series of platitudes,
that would have made the hair of any sincere disciple and believer stand on end;
and trotting, with the complacency of an idiotic elephant, among howling
labyrinths of sentences which he seemed to take for high roads, and never so
much as wanted to get out of. Then Mr. Tite Barnacle could not but feel that
there was a person in company, who would have